Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

The maharaja’s troubles had been in the newspaper, and from the way her father spoke, she guessed the other adults in line must have read the article, too. It seemed more lonely and shameful than a privilege to walk up the gangplank with so many eyes staring. She felt sorry for the little maharaja, a man who had too many bags to carry by himself, and what was the difference, really, between a grown-up’s shame and a child’s shame? She was always feeling sorry for people and sometimes this led to feeling sorry for herself. Sympathy was messy business, and where did you stop the flow of it? She would think of something, a memory of something unpleasant, like being spanked in the department store or shoved into the shower with her clothes on. When she had her tantrums she couldn’t stop them once they’d started, so her father would stop them for her by putting her in the shower. Everly had once put Tinker in the shower for misbehaving. At first he was scared, but then he liked it. He was a dog and didn’t understand that it was a punishment. Later, Tinker ran away.

The line to board the ship began to move. Her mother nervously clutched the travel papers and passport, one slim green booklet for her and the three girls. There was a folded-up letter in the passport from the State Department. The letter reminded them that they were emissaries of the United States and should act accordingly. Everly held her younger sister Duffy’s hand as they walked up the gangplank. The sun was low, and the sky had turned the color of ripe watermelon. Florida was all soft and artificial colors. Pink houses, turquoise water, perfumy flowers, and huge gnarled trees with moss caught in the branches like torn lace. The air had an underwater cast to it, a greenish-blue that laved over them as they moved through the thick humidity, up the gangplank and onto the ship. She looked out to where the sea’s horizon met the watermelon sky. Already she felt closer to this mysterious place, the tropics. She pictured an island in a sea of tepid green glass, a foamy ruffle of waves lapping its shore. Beyond the shore, an endless mesh of jungle plants. The smell of ripe fruit. A forgotten lagoon surrounded by palm trees reflected in the silver mirror of the water. At the entrance to the lagoon, green vines as thick as theater drapes, waiting to be parted.

They were finishing dinner in the ship’s dining room when rain began slapping against the thick glass of the portholes in violent bursts, like someone was tossing buckets of water. Stevie was reading from a list of diversions in the guidebook. “Ping-Pong, deck tennis, and shuffleboard. Skeeball and bingo on the Lido. And with parental permission, children are invited to take a guided tour of the bridge.” She finished reading and put the guidebook in her purse to keep as a souvenir. Stevie was documenting her life as it happened. Everly was not. Documenting life as it happened seemed like a way of not experiencing it. As if posing for photographs, or focusing on what to save and call a souvenir, made the present instantly the past. You had to choose one or the other was Everly’s feeling. Try to shape a moment into a memory you could save and look at later, or have the moment as it was happening, but you couldn’t have both. Everly had not saved the homemade newspaper, the Lederer Times, which she’d spent an entire weekend working on before they left Oak Ridge. Just threw it away along with a huge box of schoolwork and drawings. My things, she’d thought, to destroy if I want to. Her father had printed copies of her newspaper on his Teletype machine at work. She had intended to make a daily, then scaled it down to a monthly, but only ended up making one edition—“March 1952.” It had three articles: “Largest Hailstone Ever Recorded”—six inches in diameter, with a drawing to illustrate the story. “Timothy Hodgkiss Says You Can Die from Eating a Cigar,” a rumor that was confirmed by the school nurse. And “Lederers Are Moving to Cuba!” with more illustrations and a story that included a few fibs, like that Everly would be getting a pet monkey from China, so young that he wore a diaper and would have to be fed green coconut milk from a bottle. And her own pet parrot, like the one that sat on Barbecue’s shoulder in Treasure Island, except hers wouldn’t be called Cap’n Flint. He’d be called Jim Hawkins, and he’d recite lines from the book. “I’ll tip you the black spot!” the parrot would say, but only to people who were mean. It seemed incredible that parrots could talk. And that they could live for a hundred years, which meant Duffy would have to take care of the parrot after Everly was dead, a detail she included in her article. Her mother said it was “morbid.” What did it mean? That you weren’t supposed to think about death.

Out the dining room window, rain pocked the surface of the sea, making dimpled patterns that changed as the wind shifted the angle of the rain. The wind crescendoed and decrescendoed, sounding like the braided voices of distressed people. The week before, at Everly’s final piano lesson with Mrs. Vanderveer, Mrs. Vanderveer had played a Chopin prelude to demonstrate a proper crescendo and decrescendo. Everly’s favorites were the Chopin preludes. They were all in a minor key, and she only liked music in a minor key. And music that called for damper pedal. In private, she used the damper pedal more than the sheet music indicated, which made her feel thoughtful and dramatic. For the decrescendo, Mrs. Vanderveer had leaned low and delicate over the keys, pressing them softer and softer, notes melting away in the final stanza like a glassy sliver of candy on the tongue, nothing remaining after the note but a vibration, a silent thing that hung in the room. A feeling that was there even though you couldn’t see it and it made no sound.

But she was lazy and didn’t practice enough, only played her favorite things and ignored those that were too difficult, or in a happy key, went to her lesson with her hands dirty, her fingernails uncut. At her last lesson she’d been overcome with regret. She wouldn’t have any more chances to please Mrs. Vanderveer by practicing diligently and coming prepared, trimming her nails and scrubbing out the dirt. Life was going to be like this. You only understood how to behave and appreciate things when they were being taken away from you.

The ship began to rock, left and then right, and the horizon moved up and down through the window. Duffy started to cry. A man’s voice came through a speaker, echoing loudly through the dining room. “The captain requests that all passengers please return to their cabins.” Her mother wrapped several uneaten dinner rolls in napkins and put them in her pocketbook. As they all got up to file out of the dining room, the ship leaned again, and the floor of the room tilted up like a Whirl-a-Wheel. A cartful of dirty dishes crashed sideways, and a giant coffee urn spilled over and began glugging a lake of coffee onto the floor.

No one was allowed up on deck.

“Darn. No bingo on the Lido,” Stevie said.

Duffy bounced up and down on the bed. “Bingo on the Lido! Bingo on the Lido!” When she was worn out from jumping up and down, the room was quiet except for her panting and the sound of the rain.

They would cross the Tropic of Cancer sometime during the night. Maybe they were crossing it now, Everly thought, picturing the prow of their ship slicing tracelessly through that invisible border and into the tropics, a zone between Cancer and Capricorn that went around Earth like a person’s belt around her waist.

When Everly told the school librarian, Miss Jiggs, that her family was moving to Cuba, Miss Jiggs pulled out a book called Empire in Green and Gold . Perfect yellow bananas dressed like flamenco dancers in red lipstick and pearls danced across the bottom border of the book’s pages. The book said Cuba was the world’s sugar bowl. Everly pictured a pink crystal bowl, beveled on the edges and filled with glinting white sugar. A pink crystal lid, cut like a gemstone. The sort of thing Mrs. Vanderveer would have brought out for tea service.